Apple TV+ psychodrama The Crowded Room takes a look back at Danny’s childhood this week to examine the start of his troubles and trauma.
Danny’s issues began when he was young, in the presence of a mysterious twin brother, an absent father, a new stepdad and a mom tired of being defeated by life. Add to that a sexual abuse case and Danny’s mental illness, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster — and a show that keeps running right up to the line of greatness before retreating.
The Crowded Room recap: ‘Savior’
Season 1, episode 4: In the episode, entitled “Savior,” criminal psychologist Rya (played by Amanda Seyfried) wants to know about Danny Sullivan’s (Tom Holland) childhood. As a boy (Zachary Golinger), Danny was in a bad way because his dad walked out on the family and took his twin brother Adam with him. He had trouble with a bully at school (Wyatt Axel), and a guidance counselor (Sam Breslin Wright) tried and help him become better adjusted.
Danny’s mom (Emmy Rossum) didn’t know how to handle her troubled boy, and Danny’s fascination with his mother bordered on clinical. She also quite clearly (spoiler coming but only if you haven’t been paying attention at all) didn’t know what to do with Danny’s insistence that his twin brother had been sent away … why? Because Danny obviously didn’t have a twin brother.
One night, Danny was in the bar where his mom worked when two black couples came in and some racists started a fight with them. Danny wound up covered in some of the strangers’ blood and viewed the bloodletting as a kind of ritual, a thing that brought evil into his life. Soon after this, his mom met and started flirting with child psychologist/truant officer Marlin (Will Chase), who became her husband.
Marlin seemed like the perfect addition to their home, except that Danny wanted his parents to get back together and Marlin was going to make that impossible.
One day when Marlin picks up Danny from school, the guidance counselor has pulled Danny aside and started touching him and sitting between his legs. Marlin knew what was going on even if Danny didn’t. Smelling blood in the water, Marlin takes Danny to a barn across town and molests him. He did this for years, though Danny believed it was happening to Adam.
Please, Mom
Emmy Rossum is quite good in The Crowded Room. She doesn’t get a ton of opportunity outside of the show Shameless, on which she was a regular for what felt like forever. I hope she keeps getting to tackle roles like this one (though it would be better if she were a lead instead of texture).
Director Kornél Mundruczó manages to make the scenes of Danny’s childhood with his mother seem genuinely idealistic and lovely, lost in the haze of broken promises. The trouble is we have to get back to the stuff that speaks directly to Danny the elder’s experiences.
The scenes of Rossum falling in love with Marlin are marvelous. Just a perfect depiction of a lazy, sunny day’s flirtation, and Rossum with her dreaming eyes and huge hair has the perfect look for such a scene. Mundruczó does excellent work whenever he’s not telling The Crowded Room’s main story, just letting images of his characters tell their own stories. Which of course means he’s in the wrong place (television). However, as a film director, he also shoots himself in the foot by insisting he write his own scripts, which turn out didactic and lead-footed.
To ricochet blithely between idyllic lyricism and blunt trauma (to kids no less) is just not a tonal swing this show can pull off without seeming icky, especially because it’s still clinging to the idea of Danny’s personality disorder being a mystery, which by now it isn’t. Ultimately it’s an unhappy medium … and a ragingly imperfect show.
★★☆☆☆
Watch The Crowded Room on Apple TV+
New episodes of The Crowded Room arrive Fridays on Apple TV+.
Rated: TV-MA
Watch on: Apple TV+
Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper and But God Made Him A Poet: Watching John Ford in the 21st Century, the director of 25 feature films, and the director and editor of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.
